I played M6 DH back in S9 and was running GR90s at under 1k paragon with very few augments and very rarely dieing. Maybe like 1 death per 3-4 rifts from not paying attention. With the buffs added for S12, I'd guess that it'd be extremely faceroll, far more so than it was back in S9 when I played it.

Through the 11 seasons I played, I'd say M6 was the laziest and easiest build to play.

I wish they would pick builds for CRs that are interesting and fun, but less well-known.

How do you identify such builds with an algorithm? I mean we can easily browse the LBs and spot fun builds, but how to program the selection system to do it? It is not that trivial.

They can simply hire someone to pick the builds. There is no reason for them to be using an algorithm to pick builds on such a new system. Even if they wanted an automated process it should be done much later, like at least like 3-4 months down the line.

I did GR80 on a HC DH after about 20 hours total of solo play last season using the M6 set. I was plvl'ed to 70 (so saved like 4 hours), but did not have haedrigs gift so I had to farm starting from normal, through about T8 then moved on the GRs.

Considering GR70 only needs like 1/4th the DPS of GR80, and the DH haedrigs in S10 is marauders, I'm sure the entire leveling + GR1-70 process can be done as DH in like 10-15 hours total.

I actually care about 0% between primal 1.0 and 2.0. Both of them would have roughly 0 effect on the way I play my character since all they do is a minor stat increase. To actually be exciting, they would need to do something that actually alters gameplay or the way my character looks in some way. Doing 0.25% of a GR tier higher after finding a primal is pretty much a 0/10 for excitement.

How do people still consider GR70 as a wall? It takes like maybe 10 hours at lv 70 to pick up the gear needed to do a GR70.

A GR70 while wearing a set is probably even easier than doing the GR45 no-set conquest.

Not everybody plays the meta builds. Not everybody knows how to play. A friend of mine would never reach GR70 solo. She's not a gamer per se. She likes D3 and plays it every now and then, which leads to her losing track of what's happening and her dying a lot.
Why is she not allowed lucky drops in form of primals?

Would someone that doesn't know how to play actually care about primals in the first place? I mean I place on the leaderboards regularly and hardly even care about ancients myself aside from being able to stick an augment on it, lol. Primals are kind of like just something nobody really asked for.

I think having a wall at 70 is pretty retarded too. I mean if i were to put a wall, I'd stick up somewhere up at like the top 1% or less where only people that cared like super seriously would ever get. Something along the lines of like Gladiator in WoW, Legend in Hearthstone, Grandmaster in StarCraft, etc. I don't know why they'ed stick a wall in the middle of the general playerbase.

I just feel like 70 is just such a half-assed wall that it's not really even a wall at all. It's kind of just there, for no purpose. Nobody likes it, nobody wanted it, it really doesn't even make sense aside from being mildly annoying. It's not high enough to be a real goal for someone serious into the game, and it's a pointless obstacle for players that log in out of sheer boredom.

I just crafted some sage pieces for my HC seasons alt DH and recorded a T8 run with one of my builds. Was trying for about 12 minutes, but ended up as 11 minutes instead since I didn't use a timer, just looked at in game clock. Uploading the video to youtube now. I ran this build in the past at some point very comfortably in T10 on a more properly geared seasons DH. Build is likely capable of over T10 in the right gear, but I switched builds before really trying.

Got 126 DBs, though 21 were from a blue gob. So 105 DBs from non-goblins, plus some wasted time killing and looting the blue gob. I also left 2 DBs on the ground, lol. Would be pretty close to 120 DB in 12 minutes, which is what you got with shadow/sage-FoK.

Just for reference, I only started HC like 4 days ago this season, and the run is on is my HC alt. So the character is pretty poorly geared:

- 0 ancients

- 0 augments (obviously)

- 531 paragon

- 7700 dex, lol

- A lv60 or so bane of trapped, and 2 other crappy gems, i think lv25 on both

- I have a wasted passive and cube item (awareness passive and Gunes because I'm playing HC. HP doesn't even dip in T8, but better safe than sorry).

As an additional note, I haven't played this for a while. So as you can see I run into walls, backtracked like half a map running into a dead end, shoot facing the wrong direction, missing prep on cooldown a bunch of times, etc. And even with poor gameplay and awful gear it still performs just as well as the builds that were posted here.

I agree with everything you say. But would you be so kind to share those other, more efficient DH Sage's builds? I have time at some point in the future I might try them out and add videos, at least of TX/T11 (I found the T8/T12/T13 videos to be pretty useless and only did them to highlight that T8 is good for lower paragon/worse gear and gems, and T12+ is almost always worse in terms of efficiency because of the Sage's implementation of "+1" instead of "*2").

I just took the best Sage's builds I could find in our DB, and other DHs I talked to told me their weren't better ones. So if you say there are... well, where are they? ;-)

Finding the builds and sharing them should be a job for streamers and youtubers. I mean I don't know which DH's you've talked to about sage sets, but I know at least 3 different setups that perform both better and easier for me than the 2 DH builds in this thread. Not to mention they all have quite a few variations to them for adjustment to different difficulty, and T11 and 12 really doesn't drop efficiency in decent rolled gear with at least one of them. That's just from casually testing out sage setups over the past few seasons when I need to farm DBs, there's probably quite a few more builds, likely even ones better than the ones I've found. There just needs more people to look for them.

Anyways, I'll upload one of the setups later to at least have a reference point that there are better setups, but probably won't upload the others. Will leave those to the streamers and youtubers to find

I'd be curious to see your 168 DB build and like to try that myself. The builds aren't outdated, the issue simply seems to be that the top DH builds/sets do not allow good combination with the Sage sets. I talked to some DHs and they said that basically Sage's is okay-ish for the beginning, but once your UE gear is good enough to clear T11+ it's just so much faster and better that it's not worth it to use any of the clunky builds I tested.

Also keep in mind that "testing your own build" means that you have more experience with it and play it much better than someone else who just takes a build, slaps items/skills on, and gives it a go (that's why I labeled this "brainless comparison"). I didn't work on my playstyle for an hour or so for every build, I treat every build with the same disrespect

In the end all of this is just a sample comparison and not the definitive truth. Just helped me to see how many different builds there are and test some of them; I ended up playing some of those recently but just picked the one that I liked with regard to playstyle, even if I sacrifice a few percent efficiency. After all, it's a game...

Hmm, I personally think the issue is a lack of testing and experimentation, because I have used sage setups with DH in T11 earlier in the season without feeling clunky doing so. Also clunky comes by design, as should be obvious with setups that require more CD and/or resource management.

There will always be some "testing of builds, items, and variations" since I like to design my builds myself. Even my GR pushing DH M6 setup is fairly customized, which had a GR92 clear earlier in the season (rank 4 at the time, rank 3 after people got banned, lol) despite being a solo player and thus under paragon, gem level, etc. While I never really polish builds like I did back when I was youtube'ing, I do at least enough basic testing to see if it works and if some obvious variation is clearly better.

As for playing builds better, I think it's questionable. How well a build is played in large part depends on how easy it is to play a build. Another major factor is just how compatible players are with the style. Like I've played shadow/sage way more than 12 minutes (more like hours) a few seasons back, and can say that you play that build better than I do based on your 12 minutes of gameplay. As far as builds goes, even for speeds GRs and speed T13s there are other builds (along with variations as well) that I prefer over the standard UE that most players seem to run, probably in part because I'm actually pretty bad at playing UE. I don't think build compatibility is really universal, different players are likely to excel in different builds.

Don't get me wrong, I like the compilation of what you did. It's just that as a DH player I can't help but notice that the builds submitted by DH feel old and lacking. There are at least a few other DH sage builds that IMO are more fluid, easier, faster, and capable of higher torment. Some of which already existed in previous seasons.

I simply think D3 has a lot more viable builds and variations for DBs, speed GRs, pushing, etc than most people realize.

The 2 DH builds chosen in this seem pretty sad. I think maybe just too outdated. Maybe we no longer have streamers/youtubers updating players with new builds, though at the same time it does let players go out and actually design their own builds. I timed some sessions at 12 minutes each on my seasonal DH with one of my DB builds and have gotten to as high as 168 DBs without killing goblins. Setup might not have even been that optimized either since I had never timed runs on it before back when I was using it. Fairly sure most of my setups I've used over the past couple seasons would at least beat that 120 in 12 minutes. Wonder how long till a streamer will start working on builds and find a similar build to any of the ones I use.

On another note, i didn't even hit 600DB/hour rates like you're getting when I tried playing shadow/sage back in the day. It's like the hardest build to play, lol.

I also think the rift makes more than a 12% difference, especially with ingeom setups. Maybe I just suck really bad at running into dead ends, but some rifts are way better than others.

Hopefully D3v, similar to how they are finally making a vanilla version of WoW. Would be interesting to see how many players truly liked the original version of D3 more than the current version. At least it would give them some more solid info on player preferences before they make D4.

I ran a somewhat similar build earlier in the season, but without BP or partheons. I preferred using unity + strongarms. Had some differences in skills as well. Overall didn't feel competitive to U6 though, so eventually just re-gered that monk into a simple gen build with sages to farm my DBs while doing Grift with the regular U6 setup.

That answer on multiplayer vs single player is really kind of sad. Their perspective is placed entirely around friends, when in reality many people that enjoy single player need to join public games or screw with their real life schedule in order to play in groups.

It's not just more efficient, it's that 4 players that are terrible at the game would be more efficient than the best player in the world solo'ing.

If your friends aren't on, you shouldn't have to add random players into your party to stay semi-competitive.

The gap is just way too large. I mean why is there even a solo leader board when all the solo players are in groups to gain the gear and paragon exp that they use in solo.

i kinda disagree ..the leveling process, yes it feels nice, but it is something what you should only do once.. you go through whatever you want and you are done (if you like it, you DO HAVE the option to do it again).., if you were forced to lvl up every single character through story mode with no boost etc.. i guarantee that there would be much more ppl complaining..

I think leveling should be completely removed from seasons. However, if leveling is staying in the game than it should be relevant, and about finding the right gear and skill to level. The start of the season went like this:

Spend like 5-7 hours to level

Take like 3-5 hours to gear enough to farm T6

Do Grifts over and over again

The leveling right now wastes more time than gearing your character for the highest content outside of GRifts. It's clear that the whole game revolves around GRifts. So if leveling is going to be a thing, it needs to be relevant rather than just a pointless time sink. Otherwise they would be better off just starting players at 70 and just let them start GRifting.

Something to keep in mind is that it's pretty much impossible to keep D3 as a truly competitive game. The main reason is that it's a loot hunt game, meaning loot has to be worth farming for. Same goes with paragon exp. At the same time, anytime players stats are no longer equal, skill become less and less important, while luck and amount of time played becomes more and more important.

When you look at competitive games, the playing field is nearly even for all players. Differences go as far as cosmetics, and that's about it. D3 has too many layers of separation between player base. Looking at just armor you have:

No set

Wrong set

Right set non ancient, wrong rolls

Right set non ancient, right rolls, low rolls

Right set non ancient, right rolls, high rolls

Then on top of that you have the whole thing in ancient form. And then there's weapons, following a similar pattern. Paragon levels is one more level of character disparity between players. Realistically people can't compete out of their own gearing category, which leaves that game so better gear = gets further. Skill only really matters assuming gearing requirement is met.

Basically every time the loot hunt is improved (hellfire amulet, ancient items, etc) the competitive aspect of the game is worsened due to the larger gear disparity. Improving the loot hunt and making the game more competitive really can't go hand in hand unless there is a competitive aspect that doesn't account for player gear and paragon points. And if something like that were to happen, there likely would be no point farming gear.

I really wish I had more info to provide you, and I do thank you for understanding that we'll do the best we can here. One last thing - I won't be here for much longer in the day, but when I return on Monday I will be sure that we've followed up with you. Thank you for your patience TianZi, I can't promise that we'll have a different answer for you, but we'll see what happens.

It's funny how Blizzard posters try to act friendly, yet at the end they simply don't follow through with what they say. It's now Tuesday night here and I still haven't gotten any sort of "follow up" through email or ticket response. Not even a response saying they need more time or anything.

Why do they even say they're going to follow up if they aren't. It's ridiculous that they just randomly ban people, and constantly avoid contact with the player after that.

I spent all my RMAH balance buying gems to flip for gold and got banned for it. Didn't even know about the dupe until afterwards. Plus it's pretty obvious nobody would spend $180+ on gems to sell for gold if they knew they can just dupe gold, LOL ... So I guess Blizzard's investigation kind of failed. Doubt I'm the only one that got screwed in this mess.

So now I'm down $182.30 from buying gems, with my accounts banned with like $600-700 of items on it, and unable to even get a ticket response to answer what they think I did wrong that deserves a ban.

I've bought gems and sold them on RMAH somewhat regularly over the past 3 or so months. However, it was generally more like $20 of gems at a time to reduce RMAH balance and get gold. This time I spent ALL my RMAH balance simply because I thought the change in floor price of legit gold caused gems to temporarily change in price right after the patch was released. Gems were going for around 80-100m when I sold the, they weren't the 200m or whatever people claim they eventually went up to.

Actually, now that I read into it again, you can be suspended/banned for selling bulk gems during the whole fiasco.

Multiple people on my friends list were temporarily suspended. Because at the time of gold duping, if you sold mass gems for 10x the regular price of gems, you were actively taking part in manipulating the market. It's part of their whole investigation.

Yea, it's looking like a perma ban now, as I get the error 52 message now. As far as I know of the friends on my friends list, I'm the only one that got the perma ban for only selling gems. A friend that duped gold once got perma ban, though he did say he duped once to test it out.

It's actually my second time getting suspended for selling gems as well, though the first time Blizzard un-suspended me telling me that what I was doing is fine (buying gems from RMAH to sell on gold AH). That was roughly a month ago. Maybe that has something to do with the ban this time since it was technically my second suspension in a short period of time, even if Blizzard admit the first ban was a mistake. Blizzard won't tell me any reason aside from being somehow linked to the duping incident. I had a few other friends who sold gems as well, but they didn't sell such a large quantity of gems. Some of them didn't even get a temporary suspend though, and got to keep the gold they made.

I spent all my RMAH balance buying gems to flip for gold and got banned for it. Didn't even know about the dupe until afterwards. Plus it's pretty obvious nobody would spend $180+ on gems to sell for gold if they knew they can just dupe gold, LOL ... So I guess Blizzard's investigation kind of failed. Doubt I'm the only one that got screwed in this mess.

So now I'm down $182.30 from buying gems, with my accounts banned with like $600-700 of items on it, and unable to even get a ticket response to answer what they think I did wrong that deserves a ban.

I made an attempt at it, getting back the most generic response possible from Customer Service Rep Whimso:

Greetings,

The Diablo III license associated with this account was recently locked to investigate in-game economy abuse. We have completed our investigation and have sent an email to this Battle.net Account’s email address with the results of our findings and any actions taken.

Thank you for your patience while we conducted this investigation.

Regards,

Blizzard Entertainment

The details from my email don't tell me anything, or even why I was banned:

The Diablo III license associated with this email address was recently locked to allow us to investigate potential in-game economy abuse. After careful review, it was determined that this license was involved with the abuse in question.

I made some pretty good friends from both the Blizzard forums, my YouTube channel, and friends from previous Blizzard games which already offered helping me re-gear to as good gear as what I wore in my videos, so simply getting back into the game really is no issues aside from paying $60 on a new account. However, I'm still really undecided what I want to do from here, as I simply can not understand why Blizzard handled things the way they did. The thing is their "careful review" is absolute bullshit. I mean they can look at my RMAH sale, Gold AH sales, and see exactly what I did, which didn't involve duping gold.

Meanwhile, we have people that pull off things like this, and somehow manage to remain un-banned. Nothing against they guy, but he really deserves a rollback, LOL. I'm almost certain that their "careful review" involved a script coded more poorly than black weapon damage and +%elemental damage, which results in the wrong people getting bans/rollbacks.

I spent all my RMAH balance buying gems to flip for gold and got banned for it. Didn't even know about the dupe until afterwards. Plus it's pretty obvious nobody would spend $180+ on gems to sell for gold if they knew they can just dupe gold, LOL ... So I guess Blizzard's investigation kind of failed. Doubt I'm the only one that got screwed in this mess.

So now I'm down $182.30 from buying gems, with my accounts banned with like $600-700 of items on it, and unable to even get a ticket response to answer what they think I did wrong that deserves a ban.

I never really understood why people feel the loot drops are that bad. I mean it's clear that there are superior items on the AH, but it's not like the stuff you find isn't viable to use for beating the game either. People have beaten the earlier version of inferno on self found gear, and there are players doing high MPs fine on all self found gear now. The AH is simply a shortcut to make it easier, or to use less skill (more face tanking). I can't speak for other servers, but on Americas the AH was down more often than not for the first couple weeks of release, yet many players still did fine even on mostly self found gear.

Ever since D3 came out, while farming Inferno Act 3, I would regularly sell direct upgrades for my character since I prioritized keeping the money rather then trying to deck out my character. I was definitely getting good drops back then. Based on my PayPal I believe it's somewhere along the lines of $3500 from May through July of mostly self found gear. I did began flipping items pretty regularly sometime after 1.0.4 hit though, as somewhere in the process of altering loot the drop chance went up too much, while quality went down quite a bit. In terms of the "drop quality AND quantity", I actually liked where it was at release, but many people complained about all sorts of things.

As of now, loot quality was nerfed multiple times, to the point where farming is simply inefficient compared to flipping. Even though I still play D3, I think I've only found one $10 item (lacunis) this entire month. Pretty terrible from a loot perspective, though I still have fun playing.

-----

At this point, I really don't think it's possible to save the softcore economy. It's simply broken, and still without a loot sink of any sort for decent items. Personally, I'd like to see a self-found ladder server, ​ preferably cross region for a larger player base (sort of like PTRs).

I don't think the AH itself is a bad idea, as it simply simplifies trading. So if trading is allowed in the game, I feel like the AH also has a spot in the game. However, I think a no-trade and no-AH ladder that resets regularly (maybe every 1-2 months) would be both fun and exciting, simply to see how many people manage to do MP10 on SELF-found gear in that time frame.

I'm hoping Blizzard adds in some sort of separate server with a Ladder. While I'd appreciate ANY ladder system, I do wish they put in a self-found only one.